The Carbon System and Several Useful Procedures

Another environmental issue is the use of organic solvents. The use of chlorinated hydrocarbons, for example, has been severely curtailed. In fact, so many of the solvents favored by organic chemists are now on the black list that the whole question of solvents requires rethinking. The best solvent is no solvent, and if a solvent (diluent) is needed, then water has a lot to recommend it. This provides a golden opportunity for biocatalysis, since the replacement of classic chemical methods in organic solvents by enzymatic procedures in water at ambient temperature and pressure can provide substantial environmental and economic benefits. Similarly, there is a marked trend toward the application of organometal-lic catalysis in aqueous biphasic systems and other nonconventional media, such as fluorous biphasic, supercritical carbon dioxide and ionic liquids. ... 

Several other nmr procedures have been used for the determination of fractionation factors. These have advantages in some systems. Instead of determining the effect of the concentration of an exchanging site on the averaged chemical shift, the effect on the averaged relaxation rate of water protons can be used in a very similar way (Silverman, 1981 Kassebaum and Silverman, 1989), For example, addition of the enzyme Co(ii)-carbonic anhydrase to an aqueous solution increases the observed value of XjT because the proton-relaxation rate is the average of that for the bulk solvent (cfl. 0.3 s ) and that for water bound to the cobalt ca. 6x 10 s ). The average is different in an H2O/D2O mixture if the bulk solvent and the Cobound solvent have different deuterium contents, and it has been used to determine a value for the fractionation factor of Co-bound water molecules in the enzyme. 

The concentration of any of these species depends on the total concentration of dissolved aluminum and on the pH, and this makes the system complex from the mathematical point of view and consequently, difficult to solve. To simplify the calculations, mass balances were applied only to a unique aluminum species (the total dissolved aluminum, TDA, instead of the several species considered) and to hydroxyl and protons. For each time step (of the differential equations-solving method), the different aluminum species and the resulting proton and hydroxyl concentration in each zone were recalculated using a pseudoequilibrium approach. To do this, the equilibrium equations (4.64)-(4.71), and the charge (4.72), the aluminum (4.73), and inorganic carbon (IC) balances (4.74) were considered in each zone (anodic, cathodic, and chemical), and a nonlinear iterative procedure (based on an optimization method) was applied to satisfy simultaneously all the equilibrium constants. In these equations (4.64)-(4.74), subindex z stands for the three zones in which the electrochemical reactor is divided (anodic, cathodic, and chemical). 

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